Funny thing — the more I got into photography over the years, the fewer photos I actually seemed to take. When I got my first digital camera I carried it around with me everywhere. I was smitten. But it seemed like the more “serious” I got about my photography, the more I got into lighting and portraiture, the less I carried a camera around just for fun. While I was trying my hardest to put together a “professional” kit, I kind of lost the joy of just walking around town experimenting and making beautiful mistakes. And try as I might, I’ve never really warmed to the camera on my phone — it has always just felt off to me, like taking a picture with your shoe.
I’d been thinking about that since Kenji was born, though. Lili takes a thousand pictures a day, and gets a lot of great candid stuff that I never would. So I started thinking about what it might take to draw me back to a place where I could feel comfortable just documenting, experimenting, and making new beautiful mistakes. There was only one real answer that I found: the Fujifilm X100V. It’s a beautiful object that very much reminds me of when I first started taking pictures with a Canon AE-1. So, I had resolved to set aside some money and do that for myself this year.
Then Lili, amazing, lovely partner that she is, bought me one for my birthday. And holding it, shooting with it, is everything I had hoped it would be. It has made me really excited to just tinker, and experiment. It is my general intention to treat the X100V as if it were a film camera — unless absolutely necessary, what I get is what I get. So these are all shot with in-camera settings (this set uses a recipe that is meant to mimic Kodak Tri-X 400 film) and straight out of the camera with no adjustments. The fact that the focus is just a bit off on some of these — that I got his ear and not his eye — that would have driven me crazy before.
But it doesn’t make him any less beautiful. And I’m really excited to start seeing that again.
